Application of multispectral LiDAR to automated virtual outcrop geology

Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) is a valuable tool for creating virtual 3D models of geological outcrops to enable enhanced modeling and analysis of geologic strata. Application of TLS data is typically limited to the geometric point cloud that is used to create the 3D structure of the outcrop model. Digital photography can then be draped onto the 3D model, allowing visual identification and manual spatial delineation of different rock layers. Automation of the rock type identification and delineation is desirable, and recent work has investigated the use of terrestrial hyperspectral photography for this purpose. However, passive photography, whether visible or hyperspectral, presents several complexities, including accurate spatial registration with the TLS point cloud data, reliance on sunlight for illumination, and radiometric calibration to properly extract spectral signatures of the different rock types. As an active remote sensing method, a radiometrically calibrated TLS system offers the potential to directly provide spectral information for each recorded 3D point, independent of solar illumination. Therefore, the practical application of three radiometrically calibrated TLS systems with differing laser wavelengths, thereby achieving a multispectral dataset in conjunction with 3D point cloud data, is investigated using commercially available hardware and software. The radiometric calibration of the TLS intensity values is investigated and the classification performance of the multispectral TLS intensity and calibrated reflectance datasets evaluated and compared to classification performed with passive visible wavelength imagery. Results indicate that rock types can be successfully identified with radiometrically calibrated multispectral TLS data, with enhanced classification performance when fused with passive visible imagery.